As everybody is on the hunt for inbound links to their website to build PR and increase traffic, many fail to optimize the links within their site or sites.  This articles discusses the WordPress Link Plugins that you need to increase your “intra” and “inter” site linking.

When you are writing an article, you no doubt refer or hyperlink to other authority sources on that same topic. Often, those authority sources are other articles that you have written.  This presents a great opportunity to build inbound links to your content using keywords that you choose.

However, this process can be very time consuming.  Manually adding links to articles with the appropriate keyword anchor text not only takes a lot of time but disrupts the flow of your writing.

Enter WordPress Link Plugins.

WordPress Link Plugins automatically hyperlink your chosen keywords AND allow you to declare important link attributes such as nofollow.  The bottom line is that WordPress Link Plugins save you massive amounts of time and drastically increase your ability to effectively create inbound links using the anchor text that you want.

SEO Smart Links Plugin:  The Best Link Building Plugin

I have recently researched three WordPress Links Plugins and recommend just one:   SEO Smart Links.

The other two that I researched were SEO ROI’s Internal Link Building and Blog Mechanics Keyword Link Plugin.

I chose SEO Smart Links because the author,  Valdimir Prelovac, seems intent on creating, and maintaining, this plugin.   SEO Smart Links also has some great features that the others do not…like fast, effective import of the your link list (great if you have multiple sites),  linking several terms to one page, and auto linking pages.

(For older pre-Wordpress 7.0 blogs, you will want to choose Blog Mechanics Keyword Link Plugin as it supports older WordPress versions.  I have several of these so I also use this plugin.)

SEO Smart Links Plugin: How I Use It

I will not go into detail about the setup and activation of SEO Smart Links as this is covered on their web page.  Instead, I will tell you how I use it and how it can drastically save you massive amounts of time.

Let’s take this particular article as an example.  As you read it, you probably see that there are hyperlinks on this page to the various WordPress Links Plugins.  Do you know how many hyperlinks I created as I wrote this article?  Exactly ZERO.

Here is how I use the SEO Smart Links Plugin.  After I write a post, I review the article for clarity, grammar, and spelling.  Remember, during the writing process, I have included no hyperlinks.  When I do this review, I have this “post” page open and right next to it I have the SEO Smart Links page open.  For each keyword used, I will then simply add the hyperlink on the keywords page.

The beauty of this approach extends far beyond this immediate article.  Whenever I use any of these terms again, in any article past, present, or future, they will automatically be hyperlinked.

For example, last week I wrote about Wordtracker and Keyword Research.  At the time, I did not include any hyperlinks in that article because I knew that I would be adding, and writing about, SEO Smart Links this week.  Since I have just added the plugin to this blog, I will now add the keywords for last week’s article and the hyperlinks will be automatically included.

This plugin is also ideal for affiliate products and interlinking within and between sites.

If you promote affiliate products, you need only add the link one time in the plugin and it will be automatically linked each time you use it.  Additionally, you can add the nofollow attribute to each of these affiliate links.

Many of these types of plugins focus solely on intra-linking, or linking within one site.  However, this plugin is terrific if you run multiple sites.  You can maintain one master list of anchor text and links and simply import and export that list at will to all of your websites.

WordPress Links Plugins: Conclusion

As everyone involved in SEO knows, inbound links are what turns an isolated, lonely website into a well-trafficked attraction.

We often cannot control the inbound links from outside sources. They may not use the keyword anchor text that we desire or they may link to the wrong page.

We can only absolutely control what belongs to us.

It is essential that you build and manage your internal linking structures. And the best tool for this is the SEO Smart Links plugin.

Footnotes:

Suggestions for using SEO Smart Links Plugin

• SEO Smart Links  (as do the other link plug-ins mentioned above) creates links on the fly and thus can be taxing on a webserver. If you have a busy website, be sure to stress-test the application before a mass deployment. Because of this, when you deactivate the plug-in, the links go away.
• You probably want to set the # of times that a keyword is linked. If you do not, your pages may become filled with links.